Today we have released the below changes to the server. Most of it is intended to improve the new player experience through increasing performance, easing weapon control, and making Mob-Arena more interesting.

QUALITY-OF-LIFE CHANGES

Implemented new Bullet Tracer particles. (endRod)
- Enlarged the texture of bullet tracer particles.
- Bullet tracer particles now estimate the bullet trajectory more accurately.
- Fixed a bug where bullet tracer particles were always displayed based on the muzzle velocity rather than the current bullet velocity.
- Bullet tracer particles now display for two seconds for each bullet, rather than half a second.
- Optimized the amount of bullet tracer particles displayed to the shooter
- You can now see more detailed bullet tracer particles of other players which more accurately display the bullet drop
Implemented new Muzzle Flash particles. (sweepAttack)
- Made the texture of the particle more circular and detailed.
- Added a very small and subtle black smoke effect left by the particle, which noticeably adds to the visuals when firing on the move.
- Greatly optimized the performance of muzzle flash particles by lowering GPU usage by more than 90%. This eliminates the FPS drops experienced by low-end PCs when firing weapons.
- Only one (bigger) particle is now produced when a bullet strikes the block, rather than several. This reduces both GPU and CPU usage.
Fixed a bug where bullets sometimes fail to produce block hit effects if they do not penetrate the hit block.
Modified recoil on most weapons.
- All weapons now use the newest recoil recovery system.
- After the player stops firing, the recoil will always recover to its original location regardless of the weapon. The recoil patterns themselves are not changed.
- Fixed a bug where the recoil pattern behaved erratically for the Mauser C96.
- The recoil of the G36 has been raised slightly.
- Tweaked the recoil of FAMAS, G11, and QBB-95 in burstfire (should not be a significant balance change).
- Slightly tweaked the recoil of the M1919A4 (not a significant balance change).
Added a new third-party anti-cheat system to hide players behind walls much more reliably than the previous used solution.
- This should also fix the bug where players are sometimes invisible at spawn.

MOB-ARENA CHANGES

Players no longer lose maximum health when respawning in Mob-Arena.
Players now start with 5 hearts of health when respawning in Mob-Arena to encourage healing up (using class gadgets if necessary) before fighting.
Increased the amount of damage players take in Mob-Arena, to maintain the same level of challenge.
- In Easy mode, you now take the normal Minecraft Easy difficulty damage, rather than 0.85x of it.
- In Hard mode, you now take 1.3x instead of 1.15x damage. This makes the damage of most mobs similar to the Normal difficulty in Minecraft.
- Skeleton arrows now deal 0.75x damage rather than 0.5x. (This change, as well as the below changes, stacks with the damage increases above)
- Guardian lasers now deal 0.4x damage rather than 0.33x.
- Guardians no longer reflect damage to players when attacked (including melee attacks).
- The damage multiplier of TNTs now depend on their explosion power; small blasts will deal full damage while larger blasts will still deal reduced damage. This makes the Bomb Strike skill much more dangerous than before.
- Damage of evokers' Intercontinental Ballistic Fangs reduced by 30%.
The amount of particles generated by all Wall skills reduced by 50% to improve CPU performance for 1.13 players.
All Wall skills no longer start with full width. The width now starts at zero and grows to full width after 1.2 seconds, to avoid hitting players as soon as the skill is used.
All Wall skills now last half a second longer and thus go 2 blocks further than before.
The Trump wall is now a separate skill from the normal stone wall.
- It now has a distinctive American Flag texture.
- It no longer sets players on fire.
The new Stone Wall replaces the Trump Wall for most bosses. It does a fairly large knockback and 1.5 hearts of damage upon hitting a player, and also sets them on fire.
The Wall of Blindness now blinds for an extra second on Hard difficulty.

OTHER CHANGES

Vmbraticam Mob-Arena is terrible and a duplicate of the PVP map, so it will be removed tomorrow at 6:30pm EST unless something last-minute or two changes my mind. Enjoy your last games there while you're at it. By the way, Vmbraticam is Latin for nerd.